


The Dar'Hesh Irenic Confederation

by ghlyffe



Category: Stellaris (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Origin Story, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:20:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28860954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghlyffe/pseuds/ghlyffe
Summary: The Origins of the Dar'Hesh Irenic Confederation
Kudos: 2





	The Dar'Hesh Irenic Confederation

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to just be the bio for one of my custom races, but I think this is too long to fit in the box, so it can live here instead.  
> I built the race with all the DLC, so they're a fanatic xenophile pacifist race of Necroids living on a tomb world.  
> Beware references to nuclear war, as per the "Survivor" civilisation origin.

Grim Shepherd, the planet was called.  
Once, it was a lush, verdant world - a gaia world, by any other name. The Coordinator Xeu uxi Xauct looked out from the height of the marsh metallic tower housing the hordes of government officials that kept the Dar’Hesh society running, seeing the blasted and barren landscape that was left to her to govern.  
She moved, the motion causing her to catch sight of her reflection in the glass - the pallid skin, extended nose arching down almost from her forehead under a hairless scalp. The Dar’Hesh were a different race, then, too - taller and less stocky, more colourful to match the paradise that was their planet.

All of that was centuries ago - a time of prosperity and peace, by all accounts. Then again, you didn’t become the Coordinator without having a better knowledge of history than most.

As with so many civilisations, the downfall of paradise came with the discovery of atomic power. While it was true that most of the citizens of the planet did live out their lives in total peace and contentment, the separate major countries had a tense relationship at best, at the higher levels. As diplomacy and statecraft broke down, piece by piece, nobody seemed to notice. The gradual decline was always too slight to show, although laid out plainly in hindsight.

And so it was, when the bombs fell.

With a general agreement that the populace should live in peace, the oligarchs leading each major group on the planet buried the news about hostilities, leaving to live their lives in almost child-like innocence. Even the restricted histories never contained the answer most people wanted - who shot first?

As she often did when her thoughts turned this way, Xeu had to admit to herself that the answer was probably “all of them”.

And so Grim Shepherd was born from the ashes of paradise. A bleak reminder of their past, their whole planet nothing more than a tomb to billions. The earliest survivors often wished it had all ended then, that nothing was left except the warning to any other race that might find them. “Learn from our mistakes”, it would say, proclaiming their fate to the universe. They crawled out of hastily constructed bunkers, often built from the rubble of their own homes, cowering in a radioactive wasteland, waiting for an end that never came. Those who made it - those who christened this new world with a name of both hope and warning - were a new race.  
They were the Dar’Hesh.

Gradually, a new society began to form, taking its own course in this new world even as it picked over the remains of the old for the raw materials to build itself. Centralised government sprang up to organise the survivors, pulling in more as the influence and power grew. The more survivors who joined the New World, the more they started to learn what other changes had been wrought, and what had stayed the same.  
Greed, was one: even now, the Dar’Hesh respected those who managed to acquire wealth, in whatever form it took - food, materials, whatever society held as the most valuable element at any point. The most savvy of them became the core of that government, learning how to adapt and direct the society to remain wealthy.  
They did find themselves more keen to find other races and cultures, however - starting with their own. What started as a reluctant acceptance of their own physical changes grew to be a scientific drive, leading them to the one place their forebears had never gone - space. Space, with an almost unlimited array of new life, new cultures and races to meet, to trade with, to share in uplifting all life.  
That drive also led to what was simultaneously the most surprising and most relieving revelation about their societal development: a collective abhorrence of violence. They were some - Xeu among them - who believed this was because most of the survivors were those far away from the main population centres, those who had been kept in a state of peaceful bliss for so long. Certainly, this seemed borne out by the fact that the few former officials who joined the new society were those pushing for rank in the new navy, in what they hoped would be a great fleet flying the banner of the Dar’Hesh Confederation. Strangely, they weren’t too interested in the official line of peace and scientific cooperation. Since this New Order didn’t value war or violence, though, these could only find power or advancement through the few space-worthy vessels the Dar’Hesh constructed in their early centuries; certainly not enough to be able to affect anything.  
Instead, the oligarchic government stayed with bureaucrats, mostly; over time, with the stabilisation of society leading to a form of coinage based on clean energy production, research started to become a particularly lucrative field and so scientists started to become politicians as well, blending science and statecraft into the purest Dar’Hesh power structure.

Xeu had risen to power through her abilities as a scientist, originally; she proved to be just short of a savant in particle and field theory, computing and exo-materials. She even managed to include a smattering of sociology research - the latter being what had propelled her into the more lucrative side of science, at least professionally. Her predecessor - and in fact, the several before him - had come from the other side, as politicians learning later in life enough to join those working on researching new forms of statecraft and governance.  
With the ever growing campus for the subject, it was no wonder that society had so many bureaucrats and administrators, really - you needed that level of study and qualification to understand the systems that were used. The uninitiated could - and on several occasions had - managed to get lost for years in the labyrinthine archives and filing offices making up the majority of the central governmental tower. Xeu had to admit, though, that for those with the knowledge, it was certainly the most efficient system she’d ever seen. Anything she wanted, from a planetary resource management overview to the results of an archaeological dig from twenty years ago was available to her on request, appearing no more than thirty minutes after she asked for it.  
She had tried to find something there herself, once - with all her scientific accolades, she’d thought she was up to the task. She was still a fairly junior politician at the time, already singled out as a candidate for succession in the next round of elections - but after several days, she’d given up and gone through formal channels.  
It was several more election cycles before she’d managed to amass enough personal wealth to be taken seriously as a contender for leadership, eventually causing her predecessor to step down willingly in her favour. Once she had the power, she’d brought all her real scientific interests back into focus, pressing ahead with developing new modes of transportation to allow them to travel beyond their immediate star system. On top of this, she commissioned the first of what she hoped to be many Dar’Hesh orbital stations, to be used for constructing science and exploration vessels and performing planetwide research on a scale they couldn’t manage from the surface.

Eventually, in the early 24th century - the station was ready, and the first vessel was ready to launch. Her own research had discovered something she called a hyperlane - a safe, stable corridor in sub-space that her models suggested could hold a properly-constructed vessel for a journey to another star system. She had travelled to the station to witness the launch, and to say farewell to the captain - an old friend from her days as a researcher, Eopt zui Poctle, a genetics and xenobiology specialist. If anyone would make the right impression on new races, she thought, he would.

One line from her speech that day was commissioned to be etched into the wall of the shipyard on Shepher Station:

“Even the Grim Shepherd knows when to set the flock free.”


End file.
